Rob Huddleston

The problem with Skyline is not that it is so truly, utterly bad, but rather that it could so easily have been very, very good. The directors, brothers Colin and Greg Strause (who bill themselves as “The Strouse Brothers”, as if we care) had in their hands a pretty good premise, but rather tragically decided to ignore it and go with what turns out to be a lame retread of about 100 previous alien invasion movies.

Things start out well: nighttime over LA, and suddenly blue fireball-like-things descend from the sky. Cut to an apartment, where a couple (Eric Balfour and Scottie Thompson) are awoken by the strange blue light and earthquake-like rumbling. Balfour’s character (it’s not one of those movies where you ever bother to pay attention and learn the character’s names) goes out into the living room, obviously the scene of a major party the night before, where another girl is screaming something about some guy being gone. Balfour stares into the blue light and begins to change … then we cut to the movie’s title. OK. I’m thinking, “so far, so good – they’re getting right to the action, so we don’t have to sit through 30 minutes of boring character development … oh, wait.”

Yup – strike 1: right after the title disappears, we get Balfour and Thompson on an airplane and are told it is now 15 hours earlier. Dammit. Character development hell, here we come. So they arrive in LA, blah blah blah hours later we see the beginning of the invasion again. And guess what? They actually show it again. Yup, that’s right – except for a brief scene of Thompson in her underwear from the opening, we actually get to watch the entire sequence over again about 30 minutes into the film. Why? No clue, but definitely strike 2.

So here’s where they cool premise briefly flashes by. The movie is, at its heart, a simple retelling of “Independence Day”: evil aliens are here and they are kicking our butts. But what makes this one different, and oh how I wish the directors, writers, or heck anyone involved could have seen this, is that we don’t have the normal global scope in this movie. There are no grandiose scenes of battles around the world until the very end; no scenes of the President rallying the troops. Instead, what we have is a four people (really five, but we never get more than four at once) stuck in a high-rise apartment while the world goes to hell around them. All they can do is hide, or peer through a telescope as the residents of LA are sucked into the alien ships or as the military finally engages (for some reason, it actually takes an entire day for the Air Force to respond) the aliens in a can’t-win battle, or argue about what they should do to try to survive. There are some brief moments where it almost looks like we’re going to get the movie we could so easily have gotten, but every time those moments are sacrificed for explosions and lame action sequences.

Strike 3, by the way, involves one of the worst endings of a movie in modern cinema. SPOILER ALERT: Please don’t read the next paragraph if you care to not know what happens.

Balfour and Thompson are, predictably, the sole survivors, and eventually make their way to the roof of the building, where they fight off a few baddies before finally succumbing. There’s actually a fairly touching moment when they realize that all is lost and bravely decide to face their fates together (again teasing us with the film-that-could-have-been). As they get sucked into the alien ship, we see that we have totally lost: no more American forces remain in the sky, and a fleet of ships off the coast is sinking in flames. Briefly, we finally get that global scope as we see that New York, London, Hong Kong and (weirdly) Las Vegas have suffered similar fates. Cut to credits at this moment, and you end up with an OK movie that manages to pull itself together at the last moment. We don’t know why the aliens came or what they want, but hey we’re all dead now so what does it matter? But you can probably guess that that is not what happens. Rather, we’re forced to endure a long end sequence aboard the alien ship. The movie still ends with all hope for humanity lost, but unfortunately it took all hope for the film with it.

Ultimately, the Strause Brothers ought to be arrested for Grand Theft Premise. Barring that, you can at least save yourself the trauma of sitting through their horrific film.

Skyline gets one and a half very disappointed stars out of five.